In This Oil Boomtown, Workers With No Experience Are Making $120,000 A Year

"Oil, the fuel of the past" ideologues............

By Robert Johnson | Business Insider – Fri, Mar 9, 2012 10:46 AM EST

When I went to Williston, North Dakota to cover the oil boom for Business Insider, I knew I'd find people working very hard, in brutal conditions, making a lot of money.

I wasn't disappointed.

High oil prices have transformed Williston from a quiet town of 12,000 to a boomtown of 30,000, as people have come from all over the country in search of high-paying jobs.

In contrast to the rest of the country, jobs are plentiful in Williston.

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But among all the Williston workers, performing all manner of jobs, one position was exalted more than any other — wireline.

Talking to people who were already working, making $80,0000 to $100,000 a year, it was common to hear them taper off the description of their job, and their rate of pay with, "But what I'd really like to get into is wireline."

It's understandable.

Wireline operators in the Williston, North Dakota area start at about $120,000 a year and can reasonably expect to make $200,000 annually. I heard one guy say he expected to make $300,000, but $120,000 is the norm.

Williston sits atop the Bakken oil field, 640-square miles of sweet crude whose quality rivals that of Saudi Arabia, and conditions there can be harsh. Workers in all positions put in long hours, but wireline workers sometimes have the privilege of working out of a warm truck filled with computer screens and monitoring equipment.

Terence Burns at Grynberg Petroleum says the job is still demanding. "C rews generally will work straight through until the job is done, regardless of whether it takes eight hours or eight days," he says. " That’s the primary reason why the pay is so good; the overtime can mount up rapidly on a wireline job." (See pictures of Williston here.)

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Crews can work for up to 50 to 60 hours at a time and then "hot-sheet" it into a nearby bunk, just vacated by another operator.

Wireline workers provide a long list of services, most of which rely on one factor: getting sensors, equipment, or explosives deep into a well without having to shut it down.

Burns points out that even though wireline firms often prefer to hire young workers with no experience, to learn their proprietary techniques and work with a "clean slate," there is a price.

"There may be few qualifications required to work in this business," he says, "but the work is demanding and not without risk, the conditions are trying, and the hours are long. There are reasons why it pays as well as it does."

High paying middle class jobs brought to you by OIL & GAS. Tax generating jobs brought to you by OIL & GAS. Imagine that, no government necessary. All we have here is greedy oil and gas companies filling a free market need benefitting society as whole - the stuff the liberal left HATES because it flies in the face of their rigid ideology. The don't have control.

Hava-gafa-kasha - I know your grandparents left you a bundle and you've done well with SIRI, but instead of "freelancing", the Oil and Gas industry can provide you a wealth of earnings for a little hard work. Have you ever considered North Dakota? Or do you want to stay in the liberal bastion of NYC with all of your rigid extreme left wingers?

"Meanwhile, what about jobs? I have to admit that I started laughing when I saw The Wall Street Journal offering North Dakota as a role model. Yes, the oil boom there has pushed unemployment down to 3.2 percent, but that’s only possible because the whole state has fewer residents than metropolitan Albany — so few residents that adding a few thousand jobs in the state’s extractive sector is a really big deal. The comparable-sized fracking boom in Pennsylvania has had hardly any effect on the state’s overall employment picture, because, in the end, not that many jobs are involved.

And this tells us that giving the oil companies carte blanche isn’t a serious jobs program. Put it this way: Employment in oil and gas extraction has risen more than 50 percent since the middle of the last decade, but that amounts to only 70,000 jobs, around one-twentieth of 1 percent of total U.S. employment. So the idea that drill, baby, drill can cure our jobs deficit is basically a joke.

Why, then, are Republicans pretending otherwise? Part of the answer is that the party is rewarding its benefactors: the oil and gas industry doesn’t create many jobs, but it does spend a lot of money on lobbying and campaign contributions. The rest of the answer is simply the fact that conservatives have no other job-creation ideas to offer.

And intellectual bankruptcy, I’m sorry to say, is a problem that no amount of drilling and fracking can solve."